Monthly Archives: June 2017

On June 27, 2017 Microsoft has released its quarterly updates for Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016. The current version is now at Exchange 2013 CU17 and Exchange 2016 CU6. Typically I don’t pay that much attention to this, all new developments seem to be for Office 365 and very little developments for on-premises Exchange deployment. But this time there are some interesting things I’d like to point out.

A couple of days before the release of Exchange 2016 CU6 Microsoft blogged about Sent Items Behavior Control and Original Folder Item Recovery. With the Sent Items Behavior Control, a message that’s sent using the Send As or Send on behalf of permission is not only stored in the mailbox of the user that actually sent the message, but a copy is also stored in the delegator mailbox sent items. This was already possible for shared mailboxes, but now it’s also possible for regular mailboxes (like manager/assistant scenarios).

The Original Folder Item Recovery feature is I guess on of the most requested features. In the past (before Exchange 2010) when items were restored after they were deleted, they were restored to their original location. With the Dumpster 2.0 that was introduced with Exchange 2010 this was no longer possible, and items were restored to the deleted items folder. In this case the items had to be moved manually to their original location. With the introduction of the Original Folder Item Recovery the restore of deleted items again takes place in the original folder.

Every now and then I get a question regarding creation of Room- or Shared Mailboxes in Office 365 when Exchange Hybrid is in place.There are multiple solutions available, but at the same time there are some restrictions as well. In this blog post I’ll discuss Room Mailboxes, Equipment Mailboxes and Shared Mailboxes.

Room Mailbox

To create a room Mailbox in your hybrid environment create a user account for this room mailbox first. In this example I’m going to create a Room Mailbox called ‘conference room 1st floor’ and have it created directly in Office 365 (for your information, I’ve tested this with Exchange 2010 hybrid as well as Exchange 2016 hybrid).

To create the Mailbox in Exchange Online, you can use the Enable-RemoteMailbox cmdlet in Exchange PowerShell. This will mail-enable the account in your on-premises environment and will automatically create a mailbox in Exchange Online the next time Azure AD Connect runs. For the Enable-RemoteMailbox cmdlet you need to use the -RemoteRoutingAddress (which should point to the Mailbox in Exchange Online) and for a Room Mailbox you have to use the -Room option. If you want to create a Shared Mailbox you can use the -Shared option, the result will be the same.

To create the Room Mailbox in Exchange Online we can use the following command:

When Azure AD Connect has run, the account has been provisioned in Azure AD and the Room Mailbox has been created. It is visible in Exchange Online EAC and permissions can be granted to other users can manage the Room Mailbox.

Resource (Equipment) Mailbox

To create a Resource (aka Equipment) Mailbox the process is very similar. First create a user account for the Equipment Mailbox in Active Directory and fill the appropriate attributes, like this:

To create the Equipment Mailbox directly in Exchange Online, execute the following in PowerShell (on your on-premises Exchange server):

Again, when Azure AD Connect has run, the account is provisioned in Azure AD and the Mailbox is created in Exchange Online:

Shared Mailboxes

Createing Shared Mailboxes is a bit problematic, after all these years there’s still no option like -Shared when using the Enable-RemoteMailbox cmdlet in Exchange PowerShell so we have to figure out another way to create a Shared Mailbox in Exchange Online when using Azure AD Connect and a Hybrid environment.

On every Exchange server you need SSL certificates for authentication, validation and encryption purposes. For SMTP you can use the self-signed certificate. Exchange 2010 uses opportunistic TLS, so the self-signed certificate will do in this scenario. If you need to configure domain security (mutual TLS) on Exchange, you need a proper 3rd party SSL certificate for this.

SMTP communication between Office 365 and Exchange in a hybrid scenario is an example of mutual TLS or domain security. A proper 3rd party SSL certificate is needed on your Exchange server.

I was always under the impression that mutual TLS can only use the Common Name of the certificate, which in my scenario is CN=webmail.inframan.nl. After a previous blogpost there was an interesting discussion (see the comments of this particular blogpost) about this, so now it’s time to do some testing.

Originally I had a Digicert SSL certificate with Common Name CN=webmail.inframan.nl, and a Subject Alternative Name entry autodiscover.webmail.com. During the HCW I entered webmail.inframan.nl and selected the proper certificate.

It was time to renew my SSL certificate, so I added an additional SAN entry o365mail.inframan.nl.